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. 2016 Jan 19;113(3):554-9.
doi: 10.1073/pnas.1517441113. Epub 2016 Jan 4.

The spreading of misinformation online

Michela Del Vicario  1 , Alessandro Bessi  2 , Fabiana Zollo  1 , Fabio Petroni  3 , Antonio Scala  4 , Guido Caldarelli  4 , H Eugene Stanley  5 , Walter Quattrociocchi  6
Affiliations

The spreading of misinformation online

Michela Del Vicario et al. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. .

Abstract

The wide availability of user-provided content in online social media facilitates the aggregation of people around common interests, worldviews, and narratives. However, the World Wide Web (WWW) also allows for the rapid dissemination of unsubstantiated rumors and conspiracy theories that often elicit rapid, large, but naive social responses such as the recent case of Jade Helm 15--where a simple military exercise turned out to be perceived as the beginning of a new civil war in the United States. In this work, we address the determinants governing misinformation spreading through a thorough quantitative analysis. In particular, we focus on how Facebook users consume information related to two distinct narratives: scientific and conspiracy news. We find that, although consumers of scientific and conspiracy stories present similar consumption patterns with respect to content, cascade dynamics differ. Selective exposure to content is the primary driver of content diffusion and generates the formation of homogeneous clusters, i.e., "echo chambers." Indeed, homogeneity appears to be the primary driver for the diffusion of contents and each echo chamber has its own cascade dynamics. Finally, we introduce a data-driven percolation model mimicking rumor spreading and we show that homogeneity and polarization are the main determinants for predicting cascades' size.

Keywords: Facebook; cascades; misinformation; rumor spreading; virality.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Figures

Fig. 1.
Fig. 1.
PDF of lifetime computed on science news and conspiracy theories, where the lifetime is here computed as the temporal distance (in hours) between the first and last share of a post. Both categories show a similar behavior.
Fig. 2.
Fig. 2.
Lifetime as a function of the cascade size for conspiracy news (Left) and science news (Right). Science news quickly reaches a higher diffusion; a longer lifetime does not correspond to a higher level of interest. Conspiracy rumors are assimilated more slowly and show a positive relation between lifetime and size.
Fig. 3.
Fig. 3.
PDF of edge homogeneity for science (orange) and conspiracy (blue) news. Homogeneity paths are dominant on the whole cascades for both scientific and conspiracy news.
Fig. 4.
Fig. 4.
Cascade size as a function of edge homogeneity for science (orange) and conspiracy (dashed blue) news.
Fig. 5.
Fig. 5.
CCDF of size (Left) and CDF of height (Right) for the best parameters combination that fits real-data values,(ϕHL,r,δ)=(0.56,0.01,0.015), and first sharers distributed as IG(18.73,9.63).
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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